Belle Gibson’s shocking, true story

On February 8, 2025By Littum

Annabelle “Belle” Gibson achieved Instagram star status while proclaiming she had an elixir for handling her terminal cancer.

“I have healed a serious and malignant brain cancer in the last few years of natural medicine, Gerson therapy and food, ”Gibson posted on Instagram in 2013. It would have been a miracle if Australians had survived for four years after being diagnosed with a brain tumor and given just weeks or months to live. In reality, it was a con implemented to launch a wellness empire that included her “Whole Pantry” cookbook (2015) and an app.

Such cancer fakers have inspired recent documents, including ABC’s “Scamanda” (Thursdays, 9 est/pst) and Peacocks “Anatomy of Lies.” Now Netflix has transformed Gibson’s crisp into a six-episoded limited series, “Apple Cider Vinegar” (now streaming). Creator Samantha Strauss first put eyes on Gibson via her 2015 “60 minutes Austral I an ”interviewWhen reporter Tara Brown pleaded Gibson about “just be honest.”

“It caught my attention that from my point of view in the interview, she would still not admit that she had been lying when she had so obviously lying,” Strauss tells USA Today. “The real life Belle is different from Belle (Kaitlyn Dever) we have created in the show. I’ve never met Belle. We have never sat down and had a conversation. I got the facts in her life and I have created a character from there. “Each episode of” Apple Cider Vinegar “emphasizes the miniseries is inspired by a true story, with fictionalized characters and events thrown in, and that the real Belle was not paid for her story. To compare the on -screen version with real life.

Is there a real Milla Blake?

In the series, Milla Blake (Alycia Debnam-Carey) embodies at least for a while, all that Belle would be. Milla found notoriousness and financial success after sharing how she treated her cancer naturally.

There are a number of similarities between Milla and an Australian woman named Jessica Ainscough, who wrote about her fight with Epithelioid -sarcoma after being diagnosed in 2008 at. 22, the same age was Milla when doctors discovered her health problems.

Ainscough, called “Wellness Warrior,” said in An interview shared to YouTube in 2012 It, like Milla, injected doctors a high dose of chemotherapy in her arm, but cancer -adapted again. Doctors wanted to amputate Ainscough’s arm and give her chemotherapy with full body, Ainscough said. But she was warned that treatment would probably not have been enough to save her life. “Basically, my case was terminal and they told me that I would probably be dead by approx. 25. ” She turned toward Gerson therapyadvertised as “a natural treatment that activates the body’s extraordinary ability to heal itself through an organic, plant-based diet, raw juice, coffee clusters and natural supplements.” Ainscough died in 2015 at 29.

Strauss says Belle’s opponent is “inspired by a whole lot of people, but is really just her own character. I loved the idea of the person lying to himself while Belle is lying to the world. “

Lucy (Tilda Cobham-Herrey) fighting metastatic breast cancer is a fictional character that demonstrates “the real world costs of what Belle did,” says Strauss.

Did Belle Gibson visit the very suspicious doctor?

In the series, Belle takes his young son to a man who presents himself as a doctor to be seen for his troubled stomach. The man who established his practice in a warehouse also examines Belle in her underwear. He gives her a belt, attaching electrodes to her temples and placing pipes in her hands showing “proof” of “cluster” and “DNA damage” in Belle’s liver. “You’re sick,” he tells her. The man then sells Belle a machine for $ 10,000 for use at home, which would allegedly prevent her tumors from growing.

It is an incredible and disturbing scene that does not venture too far from a story that Gibson shared during his “60 minutes Australia” interview. She said in 2009, a doctor came to her home and tested her using “a machine with light on the front” that allegedly depended on “German technology.” Monitoring frequencies concluded that Belle had a terminal brain tumor.

The real journalists who caught Belle Gibson

As in “Apple Cider Vinegar” journalists Nick Tuscano and Beau Donelly received a tip in 2015 that Gibson might be a scammer, they recently told Sydney Morning Herald. They discovered that many of the organizations Gibson promised money had not received the funds that shaped their first Gibson history. In the series One of the journalists, Justin (Mark Coles Smith) is married to Lucy, a fictional character that entices him to investigate Belle because of the connection.

Journalists who continued to document Gibson’s deception in the book ”The woman who fooled the world“Added that (as in the show) a panicful Gibson started calling the organizations, sending proof of bank transfers and attributing the discrepancy to a cash flow question.

In “Apple Cider Vinegar” Belle collects money so a young man named Hunter can have a brain tumor removed. But that money never runs to Hunter’s family. In real life, Gibson raised funds to Joshua Schwarz, who was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer in 2013 at the age of 5. Herald Sun reported In 2015, Schwarz’s parents were “blind -sided” by Gibson’s efforts – unlike the show, she collected the money but never told the family – and had not received a cent.

Did Belle Gibson really crashed a funeral?

In the series final, Belle arrives late at Milla’s funeral and protrudes like a sore thumb in the middle of friends and family who are burdened by real grief. When Milla’s fiancé dedicates a song to her on her acoustic guitar, Belle distracts participants with her high sobs.

In “The Woman Who Fooled the World”, Tuscano and Donelly write that Gibson created an uprising at Ainscough’s funeral, wing “sometimes uncontrolled and over the top of everyone else.”

As a witness described, it was “as if she were trying to prove that she was more destroyed than everyone else there was there,” just like the show portrayed. It appeared to be a reaction disproportionate to their short interaction, such as Ainscoughs Manager, Yvette Luciano, characterized as Only “an instagram -comment or two.”